Ruby handles this by putting such functions on its IO class as instance
methods, and then defining global functions that are just aliases to more
verbosely calling instance methods on global IO objects. For instance, puts is
just an alias to $stdout.puts, gets is just an alias to $stdin.gets, etc. That
way, people who want to type as little as possible to write Hello World
programs are happy, and people who want a consistent object-oriented syntax and
the benefits of polymorphism are also happy. Everyone is happy!
